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Digital Marketer’s look inside a holiday campaign from BarkBox was the overwhelming winner in yesterday’s poll. So, let’s get to it!

Any of y’all throw a party to celebrate National Squirrel Appreciate Day on the 21st? No? Well, the brave marketing souls at BarkBox took this obscure holiday and made it a hoot and a half after going on a social media rampage.

The holiday campaign covered a hostage situation on Barkbox’s social media by some squirrels who were pretty peeved. The objective here was to increase brand awareness. And boy, the world tuned in. Engagement from  BarkBox’s valiant effort was astounding.

How will they follow up with the success? Digital Marketer has a few thoughts…

1. Taking advantage of user-generated content to boost brand awareness. UGC allows customers to be salespeople. The campaign had fans sharing all kinds of dog/squirrel content.
2. Harness the power of retargeting. Tons of new folks visited BarkBox social pages and the tracking pixel was waiting.
3. The more people that know you the higher chance of conversions. Though we can’t be sure of the actual data, Digital Marketer is pretty dang sure BarkBox saw one heck of a return.

The lesson here is to take a chance on weird and focus on awareness. Telling customers “get 10% off your next order” doesn’t cut that cake anymore. It’s such a bland thing to say offering zero upper-hand over your competitors.

On the other hand, showing them a ransom note from angry squirrels will get attention. Click through to get snapshots of the BarkBox campaign in case you didn’t see it on the 21st.

What if we said you could play a game and work at the same time? Y’all we can spend hours playing with CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer.

When we got a blog, video, or anything that is headline-worthy, we run it through the analyzer. Think about it. If our subject line doesn’t sound appealing, do you open the email? If a title doesn’t seem helpful from Google search, will you click on it? No, ya wouldn’t.

With Coschedule’s Headline Analyzer you get top of the line titles, which lead to more people clicking on your stuff. And that’s a game we wanna win!

Some of these Super Bowl ads are like mini-series rather than just one-offs, and you gotta love the cast of characters in them.

Last week we talked about an ad with Rachel Dratch and Big Papi practicing their Boston accents. And this week we get to see what it was all for. Fellow Bostonians Chris Evans and John Krasinski join in on the fun as Krasinski demonstrates the new Hyundai Sonata’s Smart Park feature.